@Banno@Wayfarer@StreetlightX

Since ya'll from Down Under. I wanna know, do you think Djokovic's lawyers stand a chance appealing the governments decision?

To be clear, I'm not a fan of his and I think he's a clown on this - and other topics. But, that's neither here nor there. Come Monday, he should be out or what do you think?

We know a little about language, not much. I think it's "primary" use, so to speak, is to articulate thought to oneself.

Communication is done by all animals, and they don't have language, if by language we have in mind what people do. So, language can't be about communication, it would be superfluous.

Consciousness is a process of the brain, which we don't understand much at all. One can call it "physical" or "ideal", doesn't matter much what it's called. Our views about experience need not commit us to an ontology.

Yes, I agree, Dennett does appear to articulate a strain of thinking which is misleading, imo, but, influential nonetheless.

This variant is pretty crazy, everyone is getting it. At least it's less bad than Delta, but mutations are already arising.

It's incredible that we are still at this stage of things. Forget about "cooperation" with Global Warming, we can't deal with this BS.

Unreal.

I have to say, your post-quality ratio is truly impressive.

Nearly every post you make is full of extremely interesting, well thought out information.

It wouldn't be philosophy otherwise.

Is there any experience without acquaintance with nature, or any acquaintance with nature without experience? I think experience is just a word to denote that we have awareness. — Janus

True, I use experience so to avoid saying "consciousness", and to a lesser extent "awareness", as they are used too frequently.

I think technically, what you say is correct. We have acquaintance with nature in so far as we can experience parts of it. But parts of it must be outside our experience.

To my way of thinking the so-called "hard problem" is a kind of illusion based on thinking that what matter is is clearly understood; that it is something like "dead" particles that could not, according to our conception, possibly give rise to what we think of as "immaterial" subjective experience. — Janus

100%

That's actually historically accurate. Locke speaks about this extremely lucidly in his Essay. A lot of what he said has been forgotten.

I shared a quote here by him, though the whole chapter is fantastic:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/387/tpf-quote-cabinet/p11

The hard problem then seems to me to be an expression of incredulity based on ignorance. — Janus

You're speaking about this better than me. Yeah, I think we sometimes verge on the fallacy that we know so much, when I think it's the opposite. Which makes what we do know all the more impressive. There's no reason why a species should understand anything about nature.

I can go along with attributing a form of DID to everyone.

But not to nature. We don't know if nature is intrinsically like or unlike experience, so it seems to me to anthropomorphize nature in the extreme, to speak of objects as "alters".

Maybe neutral monism is a better metaphysical model/position than either idealism or physicalism, if this is the case. — Paul Michael

Yeah either neutral monism, or naturalist monism.

As you can probably tell, Dennett is pretty divisive. Personally, I don't think he makes sense. So I'll skip commenting on him, don't want to ad-hominem just because I don't like that type of thought.

I think the interesting fact about consciousness and language is that we don't have a good way to talk about ideas absent language. I think it's clear to many of us (if not most), that ideas are one thing, language is another, but as soon as we'd like to speak of ideas, we use language.

There's plenty of stuff we can't talk about, language fails to capture many experiences accurately. Other times, we can express subtle experiences through language use.

As for culture, who knows? It's what we're in all the time, but the only thing I can say about it, is that it's whatever is peculiar to us as about another group of people. Otherwise, it's the same.

Aha. Now we are getting each other.

People who reject physicalism and, for example, adopt monistic idealism (á la Bernardo Kastrup) claim that consciousness/experience is fundamental to reality itself as a whole rather than generated by the brain. — Paul Michael

His is a very interesting case. He makes some good points, I mean, it is true that in terms of acquaintance, we are best acquainted with experience than anything we study in nature.

However, it seems to me that if consciousness were as fundamental as he says, we should be able to introspect and know everything about the world. And there's lots of things to say about unconscious brain processes which are far more prevalent than mental states.

Just look at the reports of people who have taken large doses of psychedelics, for example. The chemical directly interacts with the brain, as can be observed by neuroscientists, and they all report extreme changes in their experience. These reports are pretty convincing to me that the brain generates experience. — Paul Michael

An "idealist" can say that chemicals are the way nature looks like to an experiencing being who is not aware of this. All psychedelics do is show how what we take for granted is actually a product of mind.

A "physicalist" can say, as you point out, these are just chemicals, and attempt to verify this claim by looking at brain scans.

It leaves the status of experience exactly as it was, "metaphysically neutral", as it were.

Sure, a blow to the head can alter experience pretty substantially, as can a shock to the brain and so on.

No, I mean, I personally don't have too much issues with "qualia", but it seems to me *some* people here start arguing about the term, which I don't see the point of.

So I speak of seeing outside your window, listening to music or tasting chocolate. If people have trouble with that, then we aren't going to have much of a conversation.

That is to say, we don’t need to know the manner in which the brain gives rise to experience in order to know *that* it does. — Paul Michael

Sure. That makes sense. It's assumed to be the case, because what other option exists? Surely experience is not in my finger, or nose, or leg.

I think it's a kind of massive epistemic gap. We can say some things about the human body as well as physics, we can say some things about the brain as a biological organ.

But the difference between looking at neuronal activity in a person and actually having the taste of chocolate or listening to you favorite tune, etc. is just enormous. We lack intelligence to know how this is possible.

But I'm a bit peculiar on this topic. :cool:

Most problems in understanding the world are "hard problems".

Anyone can use whatever vocabulary they see fit, I'm thinking qualia here is just a very loaded word. We all have experience, we can see outside our window and see a blue sky, or a green tree or a person walking around.

We can listen to music, etc. No problem with that.

We know way too little about the brain to think about how the brain interprets a stimulation as an ordinary object.

We have problems with the behavior of particles, much simpler than a brain. So, it's not surprise we can't say much about something as complex as seeing another person or looking at the sky, etc.

It's basically a sensory overload in which we are tricked into believing these things have shape, colours, speed and the like. Combine that with adrenaline and dizziness and you have yourself a well pulled off magic trick.

:wink:

No killing intended, messenger or OPs.

However, if rollercoasters are immune to the status of illusory entities, then I say we have a problem, because I don't know how one can ride one, if there's no time involved.

Perhaps.

But then what isn't?

What's unreal about time?

I suppose we could speculate on the whole "time before the Big Bang" topic, if that even makes sense. But that aside, I don't understand what unreal time means.

We are wayyy too far from understanding the brain to be able to say that we have an explanation for consciousness.

If the behavior of a particle is giving us serious trouble in physics, I don't think the human brain is likely to be "solved" any time soon.

Damn. That's a lot, significantly more than my family, and we live pretty comfortably.

I mean, Marx is simply just very well known, there's also the whole anarchist tradition in philosophy to consider such as Bakunin, Proudhon, etc.

It's interesting to note that, Descartes and Hume were relatively right wing figures, as was Schopenhauer. But we also have to consider cultural factors of the time, such as the Church and a different mind set too. Not that culture isn't a massive issue now.

As to your questions, well, you have a lot of freedom. You can donate to organizations and political movements and the like, find candidates that are actually good instead of typical politicians.

Nearly finished with Locke's Essay. This last bit is taxing, as he gets quite repetitive towards the end.

But, having said that, damn, what an impressive piece of work. Most of it holds up remarkably well 400 years later. Surely worth the time investment, I'm a huge fan now.

If my brain doesn't melt when I'm done, next up is:

Hume's Treatise.

Currently Reading:

Brunists Day of Wrath by Robert Coover.

We can't escape outside of our bodies to see what's out there. And even if we could, by some miracle, do so, it wouldn't change what we would consider to be valuable intrinsically.

Plainly we value things. Some things we value more than others, say we tend to value memorable experiences than staring at a wall and so on. The problem is trying to articulate a sound argument as to why X should be considered more valuable than Y.

I guess my issue is, what's the problem that's causing you to ask this question? Is it something along the lines of, "why don't people care more about politics than celebrity" or "why don't more people value art than gossip" or what?

Yeah, I remember reading about that, big woops.

Well, they're as prepared as can be. The die's been cast.

At least it'll be halfway to L2 in three days or so. It should be fully deployed a few days after that, but then calibration and getting the equipment in working condition will takes months.

Nothing compared to the wait for Pluto, but much more significant, or so we hope...

:up:

That's a lot.

But, given how much they've tested it, I doubt they'll have significant problems. So far, so good.

"Is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension."

- David Hume

:ok:

"Our knowledge being so narrow, as I have shown, it will perhaps give us some light into the present state of our minds if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our ignorance, which being infinitely larger than our knowledge may serve much to the quieting of disputes, and improvement of useful knowledge...

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not see long for instances of his ignorance...

The clearest and most enlarged understandings of thinking men find themselves puzzled and at a loss in every particle of matter... all the simple ideas we have are confined... to those we receive from corporeal objects by sensation...

But how much these few and narrow inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings, will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things...

But to say and think there are no such, because we conceive nothing of them, is no better an argument than if a blind man should be positive in it, that there was no such thing as sight and colors, because he had no manner of idea of any such thing, nor could by any means frame to himself any notions about seeing.

The ignorance and the darkness that is in us no more hinders nor confines our knowledge that is in others, than the blindness of a mole is an argument against the quicksightedness of an eagle."

- John Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.3.22

What's the technically most difficult part, is it this deployment or is it something upcoming?

Good to see the mission going as planned.

It's what we are most intimately acquainted with out of all phenomena, but is most difficult to say anything which is not trivial or obvious.

Being stuck to this, it seems to me that thinking is an activity of the brain, which accompanies self-reflection and is carried out almost constantly in waking life, and if you count dreams too, then it appears as if we think most of our lives.

When we say we had a thought, we imply we are taking out a slice of the activity of thinking and articulating it specifically, and so it "freezes" thinking in place.

As for "philosophy", this becomes terminological more than factual, and we tend to say that certain types of thoughts pertain to issues continuing to the beginning of humanity: what is a self, what is the will, what is an object, what is the right thing to do, what is experience, and so on.

It's interesting. I mean, if anyone take some gas or drug that makes them feel like they're having a deep experience, does that make it any less significant? Not attributing this to you, by the way,

Sure, you may write non-sense - it also happens when people have deep dreams, that is, writing something silly. But I wonder if someone having a "genuine" would not write something similar at the moment of the experience.

But even if it did happen like this, I think this points to a distinction between the moment of experience and the way we reflect on it when feeling "normal", two different "worlds" as it were.

The question would be, if these experiences actually tell you something deep about the world or something deep about the mind, which is a part of the world, sure, but not the world itself, in a way.

These issues of loss of ego, I think I can understand them, I've been close to having such experiences. They were quite powerful when I had them, but, I cannot imbue them with more significance than the moment I had them, in terms of me saying something like "the world is essentially spiritual" or "seeing the mind of God" or how fleeting everything is.

I think people can confuse the moment of the experience with some deep truth. But, I may be wrong here.

It can be a difficult topic. I don't have a problem with the notion of objectivity, namely giving reasons or looking for causes that can be found in nature. What causes something to heat up? The molecules speed up in the object, creating heat. That's an objective property of the world.

As for the idea of "the One", perhaps this can be illuminating in certain instances for the individual capable of having these experiences.

My intuition is not so much that we can't be objective, we can in many instances, but I tend to believe that there is a deeper cause for phenomena which cause things in nature, which we cannot conceptualize. I think this grounds the relations we see, but we don't know or understand the nature of this relation.

Which is why we always keep asking "why" questions.

Sure, it's not as if denying a personal experience or even a kind of bias in philosophical orientation, will help you see things more accurately. I mean, in some cases it might, many times though, one reaches ones point of view through personal experience.

I just don't see how we could even go about trying to find a perspective-less view to see things as they are in a natural state, not affected by any representations. But then are there "things" left at all?

It's very obscure territory.

I don't know. Maybe.

Then again, it might also be the case that in simply having a perspective, intelligent species cannot, as it were, get out of a perspective to view nature from a "view from nowhere", as Nagel puts it, to see how things are without an interpreting mind of some kind.

I'd guess that I could say that such a species could have more certainty than what we can achieve, but perhaps not perfect certainty. However, this is pure speculation.

In the empirical world, there are no guarantees in regard to final evidence, much less to "ultimate statements or judgments" about the nature of the world and the relationship we may have with it via our knowledge.

It's been established since Newton, explored by Locke, Hume and Priestley (among others), that our innate ability of understanding does not reach such high ambitions as understanding the world nor of being able to give an account for it that we can intuitively comprehend.

It's not impossible that another intelligent species somewhere else in the universe (of they exist), could have such a capacity of understanding which we lack. But we're stuck with what we have, which is plenty.

It's true, it seems defining free will causes some people to think one is going against the laws of nature. As if we knew that much about them to rule out that determinism must always follow, or that the idea of tyechism, or absolute chance, as Peirce said, is not something that could be considered as part of nature.

But why make it so difficult? Freedom is the ability to do so and so. It's situation-dependent and rarely as radical as someone ignoring all morality and killing people for fun.

Either we can do so and so in X circumstance, or we choose not to. We can be prevented from doing something by force or by moral reasoning.

Freedom is about being (as Descartes and Leibniz phrase it) "inclined and suggested" to act appropriately given a situation, but not forced to do so. I could speak about the colour of my shirt at length, but it's not relevant to the discussion. And so on.

Ethics would be kind of pointless if free will is not accepted (in some form).

Law would dish out punishment or reward, but the reasons given wouldn't make sense. Because even if you say you're doing it for societal purposes, one is assuming that people have a choice in obeying the law.

If they have no choice in obeying or rejecting the law, then it's as if the law did not exist.

I agree. And those who deny it assume we do have some form of it.

Otherwise, why argue to make a point? There's no reason to, there are only causes.

If they do argue, they assume I'm willing to change my views. But if I'm willing to change my views, I have to judge and choose each reason accordingly.

I think so too.

Why accept reasons though? There's no reason a person was killed, there's no reason to judge, it just happens.

If you remove free will for everyone, then there's not even a point in going to trial. Either get locked up immediately or not.

If there's no freedom, then it's kind of "involuntary manslaughter", there was no choice. And the judge and jury have no choice either. They do or do not put them in jail, for no reason.

I think such views make the law redundant.

I suspect that despite your comments to the contrary, the existence of free will, will (no pun) arise.

But, putting that aside, and assuming there isn't, there's no answer. For you could argue that, given no free will, I as judge, have no choice but to hold you accountable for your actions, given the risks involved in letting you go.

On the other hand, given that you are not responsible for what you did, then it makes no sense to me as a judge to punish you, because what happened could not be avoided, and locking you up wouldn't would be unnecessary punishment for an unavoidable outcome, so I'll be gracious and let you go.

But these options don't really make sense, so the assumption of no free will has to be modified or admitted.

Well, it kind of depends on what dualism one espouses. This article argues that some people are what are called substance dualists: there are two kinds of stuff in the world one which known and understood, the physical (and this is false) and one which is not understood the mental or spiritual.

I've said this too many times here to go into details again, but, first of all, this physical stuff which is claimed is known so well, isn't, we postulate 95% of the universe as being made of dark matter and dark energy, we don't know what they are, but if we don't postulate that, then the 5% we can describe, doesn't hold.

If you then actually examine what the evidence says, you discover that physical stuff is waaaay stranger than our intuitions of it being "solid, touchable stuff", in fact, it's almost completely insubstantial.

What's also insubstantial, that is, not touchable and strange? The mind, which we don't know much about, other than we have it and are acquainted with it better than anything else.

So out the window with substance dualism. Now we have the world, with many properties (the mental, the biological, the chemical, the sociological). So one can be a monist-pluralist and say there's many kinds of things which are at bottom made of the same stuff, or you can artificially say that the mental is not physical and somehow has to be fundamentally different from the rest of the world.

Nothing follows if there is another life after this one in terms of monism.

How is identifying as a Democrat equal to CNN being left? They always endorse the "centrist candidate", Obama, Clinton, Biden etc., which would be called "moderate Republicans" by the early 1990's standards.

They (CNN, MSNBC) loathe Sanders and AOC and other leftists, meaning economic leftist which is where power really belongs. If a person is pro-choice or for legalizing drugs, OK.

Democrats today would easily be to the right of most right wing parties in big European counties in economic policy.

Now, if you mention Democracy Now! or TYT or some other non corporate news, then I'd agree.

CNN leaning left is a bit like saying The Washington Post attacks Bezos frequently.